3 in 4 consumers would ditch a company if it suffered a major cyber attack

The report, titled Trust in a connected world, also revealed that 70 per cent of people would not tolerate any more than 24 hours of downtime, while 36 per cent said only a few hours was acceptable. 15 per cent said even an hour-long outage was unacceptable.

UK consumers were hit by a number of major cyber attacks last year, with 3 major retailers - Marks & Spencer (M&S), Co-op and Harrods, all suffering cyber attacks that saw operations halted, for months in the cases of M&S and Co-op.

Co-op also confirmed that the data of all 6.5 million members was compromised.

Shortly after, UK car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) also suffered a cyber attack, and was hit so hard that factory production was halted for weeks, and they required a £1.5 bailout loan from the government.

This could be a direct link to the declining trust and tolerance of companies suffering cyber attacks, particularly as incidents are more widely reported.

The report also found that 66 per cent of survey respondents said that watching mainstream news coverage of cyber attacks changed how they interact with businesses, a number that hit 83 per cent in 18 to 24 year olds.

VIEW ALL

Retailers and government services were the biggest worry for consumers, with 30 and 25 per cent of users worried about the two sectors respectively, both of which are considered “high-contact” services that consumers frequently interact with.

However, the cyber incidents themselves aren’t the main worry of consumers, with downtime primarily what they are concerned with, according to TalkTalk Business CEO Ruth Kennedy.

“Our research shows that organisations are increasingly judged less on whether attacks happen, and more on whether services stay available when disruption occurs,” she said.

“For many organisations, resilience is now a customer trust issue as much as a security issue. If critical services go offline for hours, people increasingly won’t wait around, and younger consumers in particular are much quicker to change behaviour when trust is shaken.

“That’s why resilience can’t sit separately from connectivity and infrastructure anymore. The organisations best prepared for the next wave of cyber disruption will be the ones that can recover quickly and keep services available under pressure.”

The report concludes that companies need to focus on tangible and visible solutions rather than just having more security tools to rebuild trust. Focusing on stable, operational security measures that are consistent would be the best way for companies to not only attract customers, but uphold reliable security.

“The organisations that progress fastest won’t necessarily be the ones adding the most tools. They’ll be the ones that reduce blind spots, tighten consistency across sites and cloud services, and build continuity into the network – because that’s what turns an incident from a prolonged outage into a contained disruption,” Talk Talk Businesses concluded.